How Employers Cheat Their Employees of Their Overtime Pay?

Rendering overtime work is not encouraged in most businesses. But when necessary, employees who exceed their regular working hours needs to be paid by their employers. Sadly this is not happening. Overtime pay attorneys at Williams Kherkher will tell you that some employers even devise ways on how they can avoid paying overtime pay. Many businesses wound find ways to skirt around the provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act concerning overtime pay.

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, employees covered by the law are entitled to receive overtime pay except those who are considered exempt. The rate of overtime pay is 1.5 times their regular pay. There are several things that your employer will not tell you about overtime pay. As such, you could be losing out on the actual wages you are entitled to. In order to avoid paying overtime wages, employers have devised several ways they can avoid paying overtime wage and here are some of them:

Your employer may ask you to waive your overtime

The law prohibits employers from asking employees to waive overtime. In lieu of overtime pay, employers would offer “comp time” instead. This means you will be paid for time off instead of overtime. In the first place, employers cannot ask their employees to waive their right to overtime pay.

Regular pay rate sometimes includes more than wages

When you are denied of your regular rate, you are missing out on other forms of compensation such as commissions on-call pays, base hourly wage, non-discretionary bonuses, shift differentials, reasonable cost of meals, to name just a few. The law prohibits employers from calling bonuses as “discretionary” in order to avoid paying overtime pay. Commissions and bonuses should be included in the computation of overtime pay.

Workweek is from Sunday to Saturday

Since overtime pay does not include work on weekends, holidays, or regular rest day, employers will tell their workers that the start of the week is Sunday through Saturday. This is not true. A workweek consists of seven consecutive 24-hour periods.